


Colors

by hopelessbookgeek



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-09
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 02:45:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1588727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopelessbookgeek/pseuds/hopelessbookgeek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where you can't see color until you meet your soulmate, Michael Jones's world is depressingly black and white. Gavin Free is new in town and probably kind of a loser, but when Michael starts getting friendly with him, things get serious. *Now multi-chaptered*</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which Michael is Goddamn Tired of This Shit

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! So this is from a soulmates AU I saw once on tumblr, and I just really liked the idea. It's just a one-shot but if you want it to continue I'll probably do it. Enjoy!

Michael Jones will admit it: he was jealous as hell. Geoff, Ryan, and Jack could all see color, and he was stuck with shitty black and white all because he hadn’t found his soulmate yet. Eighty percent of people have already met their future spouse by the time they’re sixteen, people say. He had no idea how true that was, but he was ten goddamn years older than that, and he didn’t so much as know what his eyes looked like, other than shitty fucking grey.

He thought a few times that he might come close, that he might catch a flash of gold or blue, but he never had. He’d studied artist’s color palettes until his eyes ached, so he technically knew what colors the world was made of (it took a long time until he could tell the difference between shades of red, since everything was slightly differentiated greys, but he wanted to know so much), so he guess he knew that his eyes were like a medium brown, but he didn’t know what the fuck that looked like and just goddamn it all to hell.

He used to sit in the park and try people-watching; after all, he lived in a populated area, and all he had to do was catch a glimpse of his soulmate and then things would be okay. He remembered, when he was just a little boy, going to his dad and tearfully asking how long it would take before he could start seeing colors. His dad sighed, rubbed the back of his neck, and explained that it could take a long time, and that he himself hadn’t found his soulmate yet.

“But you’re married to Mom,” Michael had said.

“And I love her with all my heart. But she isn’t my soulmate, Michael. Things are complicated.”

He went to his mom then to ask her whether she could see color. She could. It wasn’t until many years later that he found out her soulmate was her college boyfriend, but when he married someone else, she married Michael’s father instead. Things were complicated.

So when Michael met Gavin Free, he wasn’t expecting much, and boy was he not disappointed. Gavin came with baggage, namely an on-off English boyfriend, a probably feigned aura of naiveté, and, most literally, a fucking huge suitcase. There was something about him that put Michael on edge right from the beginning.

Still. They had to work together, and he just kept finding reasons to be annoyed by him. Gavin had a habit of squealing wordlessly if he died in a game, refused to say certain swear words in favor of ridiculous British alternatives (when Michael heard “mingy bimp hole” for the first time, he let out a string of curses so loud and virulent that they had to stop recording), and just generally took up too much space with his skinny, lanky body and hair that was ridiculously teased to look like bedhead. To make it worse, Gavin’s desk was right next to Michael’s, so he had to listen to his stupid voice one hundred percent of the time.

No one else understood what it was about Gavin that set Michael off like a lit firecracker. They fell for Gavin’s seeming innocence and sweetness, and Michael had to admit that was a tempting prospect, to buy into the lie, with his big wide eyes and his accent and the way he wouldn’t say “fuck”. No one bought into Michael’s theory that Gavin was a fucking disaster away from work, not even Geoff, who lived with him. At least, it was only a theory until he heard the phone call.

It was during lunch, about a month after Gavin started working with them all. Everyone else had left the office, but Michael had to run back to grab his wallet, and he walked in on Gavin, facing away from the door with a cell phone pressed to his ear. Part of Michael wanted to storm in as loudly as he could, disrupting Gavin’s peace, but more of him decided to just wait and eavesdrop. And what a decision that was.

“Oh, I bet you’d like that,” Gavin purred into the phone in this throaty voice dripping with sensuality. Michael had never heard someone sound so seductive before. “You’re such a little slut, aren’t you, B? I’d love to get you on your hands and knees for me, that sweet little ass in the air, just begging for me to fuck you. Yeah, like last summer. No, but better. Oh, shut up.”

Wallet forgotten, Michael backed out of the room, and only when he ran absentmindedly into Ryan did he remember what he’d meant to grab in the first place. By the time he went back to the office, Gavin was gone, so he snatched his wallet up and went to lunch.

“Michael,” Gavin said about a week later, that accent distorting the name and softening the hard edges. “I know you don’t like me. I’m not really sure why, but I know you don’t. I don’t want to work with someone who hates me.”

“Quit, then,” Michael said, not looking up from his monitor. He could feel Gavin at his side, that skinny body giving off a ridiculous amount of heat.

It was quiet for a second. “I don’t want to do that,” Gavin said softly. “Can’t we be friends? I’ll buy you a drink or something.”

“Are you asking me out?”

“No,” Gavin said too quickly. “I just thought…”

“Yeah, alright, whatever.” Anything to get Gavin away from his side. He didn’t want to go on a date with him, but the conversation was enough to make him start thinking about soulmates again, so he pulled Geoff aside as they all started to head home for the day.

“What was it like when you met Griffon?”

“Oh, man. The second I looked into her eyes, she just became all these colors, it was the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Took a while for everything else to do it, though.”

“Was it weird? Only Griffon being in color?”

“Yeah, a bit, but, you know, I was used to the world being grey. I didn’t care.”

“Is that… common? Does it work like that?”

“Sometimes. For Jack, he saw everything in color as soon as he met Caiti. Not sure about Ryan. It’s a little different for everyone. Sometimes love just takes time.”

It wasn’t a satisfying answer, but then, it wasn’t necessarily unsatisfying either. Still, it was enough to distract Michael for the rest of the afternoon until it was time to meet Gavin. Gavin did indeed buy him a drink, and then another, and then another. By the next morning, Michael didn’t really remember anything he’d done or said with Gavin, but he did remember laughing more than he had in a long time.

From there on out, Gavin’s little ticks didn’t really bother Michael as much. His accent was hardly noticeable anymore, his weird phrasings were endearing instead of irritating, and he kind of admired the dedication that went into Gavin’s hairstyling every morning. If asked, he would still deny that he cared about the kid at all, and he knew this because Ray did ask, practically every day.

“It’s not that I like him,” he would insist, sounding less sure of it every day. “It’s just that you can’t work with a guy for a month without hating him a little less, y’ know?”

“I know,” Ray would say, a knowing gleam in his eyes, though it was possible that was just the light reflecting off his glasses.

It was the Minecraft videos that finally loosened Michael’s long-held grudge. At one point, Michael, absorbed in a map, was about to walk into not one but two Creepers, before Gavin made that high-pitched shriek, yelled Michael’s name, and dove in front of him, catching the Creepers’ blasts, which blew him to pieces. “Holy fuck, dude, you had tons of shit,” Michael realizing, seeing armor, diamond, and gold among the piles of dirt and stone. “Why’d you do that?”

“They were gonna get you!”

“It’s a video game. I’d have lost a map and a ton of goddamn cobblestone. Virtual me would have come back to life.”

Gavin tipped his chin up indignantly. “Well, now virtual you doesn’t have to.”

It wasn’t really possible to hate Gavin after that. They weren’t friends, per se, but the old animosity was gone and they could make videos together in peace, and every once in a while they’d grab lunch at the same sub place and Michael would make fun of Gavin’s aversion to olives. It was a tentative friendship of checks and balances; just a glance from Michael and Gavin knew to quiet down and cut back on the ridiculous phrases, and Gavin could tell Michael to calm down by just clearing his throat.

That’s how it went until one late afternoon in November. It was time for everyone to go home, but Gavin was nowhere to be seen. Since Michael had promised him a ride home, he asked around as to where he could have gone. Kerry reported that he was pretty sure Gavin had gone up to hang out on the roof, so Michael, with a deep, irritated sigh, climbed too many flights of stairs to get to the door to the roof. Despite the exertion, he shivered with chill when he stepped outside, shoving his hands into his pockets. Gavin was sitting at the edge of the building, legs dangling over the edge.

“Now what the fuck are you doing up here, Gav?” When Gavin didn’t answer, Michael sat beside him, even as his stomach clenched at the height. He had to squint to look at Gavin, since the sun was setting behind him. “Gavin? Everything okay?”

Gavin shook his head. “Dan broke up with me.” His voice was thick and sad.

“Dan?” Was that the name of Gavin’s English boyfriend? Michael couldn’t remember if he’d ever known the name. “Was that who you were on the phone with before?”

“On the phone?”

“Oh. Yeah, uh, a few weeks ago I heard you talking dirty to someone over the phone, I thought…”

“Didn’t know anyone was listening.”

“I didn’t mean to listen. I was just surprised to hear you talking like that.”

Gavin looked down at his hands. “I don’t like saying things like that. I just did it because I know he likes it. I just wanted to make him happy…”

Michael put a tentative hand on Gavin’s shoulder. Breakups were always shitty, particularly long-distance ones. Gavin turned to look at Michael, eyes wide and tear-filled… and stunningly bright green. Michael had always known Gavin had green eyes, could tell from the shade of grey, but he didn’t know what that green would look like. He certainly didn’t expect that everything would still be grey except for Gavin Free’s puppy eyes, and hell, he didn’t expect that Gavin would be the one to…

“Well, fuck.”


	2. In Which Things are Complicated and Michael is Lost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, y'all convinced me. I'm not sure how many chapters this will end up being. There will be at LEAST one more after this one, but probably more. Please comment, and enjoy!

Gavin just kept on looking at him with those big soft eyes. “Michael? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” Michael said brusquely. “We should go, it’s getting cold out here.” He stood up and stalked away to the door downstairs without looking back to make sure Gavin was following. He was distracted as he took the stairs two at a time, and so when he reached the bottom, the heavy fall of his foot where he expected another stair to be made his heart pound.

He didn’t look back until he was standing by his car, and by then Gavin had caught up to him, which couldn’t have been hard with those ridiculously long legs of his. Not that Michael was looking at his legs. “Back to Geoff’s?”

“Oh, uh, yes please,” Gavin said in a small, distracted voice. “Thanks.”

Michael grunted in response and didn’t look at him. It wasn’t that he had a problem that his soulmate was, apparently, a guy; he knew he sort of gave off the impression that he was someone who said “no homo” unironically, but his first kiss was with a boy (okay, second kiss, but his first was technically with his cousin when he was a kid and he had no intention of counting it) and he’d always sort of thought of himself quietly bisexual. It was that he was soulmates with a coworker. With someone he met less than two months ago. With Gavin fucking Free and his gold-green eyes.

He pulled up outside Geoff’s and didn’t bother turning the car off, hoping Gavin would leave quickly and make it easier on both of them. But he didn’t, just sat there looking as though he could start crying at any minute. “I’m sorry about Dan,” Michael said, voice gruff but genuine. He was sorry that he didn’t have an excuse not to be with Gavin but he was also sorry that his friend was hurting.

“It’s okay. Thanks for the ride.” He didn’t sound very okay, but Michael didn’t know what else to say. He held out a hand and Michael clasped it firmly. As he did, color burst into Gavin’s cheeks, warm and pink. With a gasp, Michael pulled his hand away, and the color faded a little.

“So I’ll see you on Monday?”

“Uh, yeah. D’you maybe wanna grab a drink or something tomorrow?”

Michael swallowed. “Uh, maybe. I’ll call you. Or, or text you, or something. Whatever.” Gavin nodded and got out of the car, and before he even went inside, Michael drove off. When he pulled up to his own house, he whipped out his phone and dialed Ray’s number.

“Ray, I have a huge fucking problem right now.”

“Yeah, what’s up?” There was a crackly noise, like someone crinkling up plastic.

“What the hell is that noise?”

“Bag of chips. So what’s up?”

He took a deep breath and explained the whole story, from the roof to the handshake. He was trembling by the time he finished; he hadn’t quite realized how shaken he was by the whole ordeal. “Ray, I’m afraid,” he said softly.

“Don’t be. It’s just Gavin. You’ve known him for… hm. Two months. Okay. You work with him every day, though, he’s a good guy.”

“Yeah, but I don’t… I don’t love him. I don’t even think I like him, you know, like that.” He turned the car off and went inside. He really needed a drink. “I mean, I don’t think he likes me either, because of Dan. This soulmate thing was supposed to make my life easier, right? Jack and Geoff married their soulmates.” For the first time in a while he remembered the story his mother told him. Things are complicated.

There was more crinkling. “I dunno what to tell you,” Ray said, voice muffled as he spoke, presumably, through a mouthful of chips. “You’ll just have to talk to him sooner or later.”

Michael nodded before realizing that Ray couldn’t see him. “Alright, fine. I’ll talk to him on Monday.” He said his goodbyes and was about to hang up, before he remembered what he’d wanted to ask Ray. “Wait! Uh, Ray… what about you? Can you see color yet?”

There was a long pause, and Michael thought Ray had already hung up. “Nah,” he said eventually. “Whatever. I will someday. See you later, man.”

Michael heard the beep that meant Ray had actually hung up and dropped his phone on the kitchen counter. He grabbed a beer, sat down on the couch, and many hours later, passed out in front of Game of Thrones.

He spent a lot of the weekend avoiding everyone from work. He had no desire to talk about Gavin with them; he was pretty sure Gavin would have told Geoff about his weird behavior on Friday, and if Geoff knew, then everyone knew. He was pretty confident that Ray wouldn’t tell anyone, but he couldn’t be sure there, either. (He worked with a lot of blabbermouths.)

Monday morning came early for Michael, who hadn’t slept much the night before. He knew it was stupid to worry so much about seeing Gavin again– nothing had happened between them, he didn’t expect anything to happen between them, and the worst that could happen is a little teasing– but he couldn’t help it.

It was easier than he expected. He walked in with a too-hot cup of coffee that he needed to cool before he could drink and hardly anyone looked up. Jack wished him a good morning, Geoff asked about his weekend (but didn’t look any different from normal; Gavin must not have told him anything), and Ray looked at him a little concerned. Gavin showed up later and they filmed a video together. It was a Rage Quit that Michael had planned for two weeks, but he was agitated and distracted with Gavin seated beside him. He had trouble mustering his usual anger because every time he brushed Gavin’s arm accidentally, or their knees touched under the desk, the world became a little brighter and a little more colorful.

Finally Michael put the controller down and nudged Gavin to do the same, not failing to notice that when he did, Gavin’s hair became this golden-brown. “Hey, Gav, can we talk?” he murmured, making sure Ryan, whose desk was right beside theirs, couldn’t hear him. Gavin nodded, made their excuses to Geoff, and followed Michael back up to the roof, the only place they could be sure that no one would overhear them.

“Gavin, I think you’re my soulmate,” Michael blurted out, before swearing at great length under his breath. He hadn’t meant to just fucking say it like that. God damn.

“Yeah, I know.” Well, now. That was certainly a surprise.

“You what?”

“I mean, I guess I didn’t know, but I guessed. The way you looked on Friday, like you’d seen a ghost, and then… well, you’re mine.”

“I’m your what?” He had to ask because there was no way Gavin was saying what Michael thought he was saying, no way that this was a billion times more complicated than he thought, no way, no way…

“Soulmate. I knew it as soon as I met you.” He looked uncomfortable, shoving his hands in his pockets and scuffing his foot on the ground. He couldn’t look Michael in the eye. “I wanted to tell you sooner, but you didn’t seem to like me very much, and then I was afraid you’d tell Dan…”

Yeah, fuck, Dan. “If Dan’s not your soulmate, why were you so upset about breaking up with him?”

Gavin’s answering look was hurt and reproachful. “I still loved him. He was my best mate, I’ve known him for years. He said he loved me. That didn’t change just because we weren’t cosmically meant to be or whatever.”

“Oh.” Again Michael was reminded of the conversation he had with his father all those years ago. “Things are complicated,” he muttered under his breath. “Okay, so listen. I have no idea how I feel about you right now. You’re my soulmate but I don’t really know you that well and I don’t want to rush into anything just because I think I’m supposed to fall in love with you. If I fall for you, I’ll fall for you, but I’m not gonna fucking psych myself out about it until I’m convinced we’ll be together forever. Alright?”

Gavin’s eyes were wide and pretty. He had unfairly long eyelashes for a boy. “You don’t… love me?”

“I just said that, didn’t I? I barely know you.” Michael crossed his arm, partly to keep warm, partly in a kind of defensive stance. “That alright?”

“Yeah,” Gavin said after a beat too long, voice soft. “Tippy top.”


	3. In Which Love is Hard (And So is Gavin)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this doesn't really further the story, but I thought it was important to get Gavin's perspective. (It also occurs to me that the title sounds pornographic. Sorry, folks, no smut.) Thanks for reading!

Gavin Free hadn’t fallen in love with Michael Jones right away. That required some sort of fairy-tale magic that he had so far not experienced and probably didn’t exist. No, he was as surprised as anyone would be when he walked into the office for the first time, set his eyes on his new coworkers, and saw everything in color. He was giddy more than anything else because he’d waited for this for years and it was finally here, but of course it had to the one person in the room who hated him.

Michael Jones was not going to be an easy person to love, that Gavin knew right away.

It wasn’t until he got home that night did he even consider Dan. He and Dan weren’t soulmates, he’d known that forever, and Dan knew it too, but he still loved the stupid bastard even after everything. Dan loved him too, even if he could only bring himself to say so after a good hard fuck. Things were a little tricky between them.

He started to notice the world more after he could see it properly. Pictures he’d seen a thousand times were finally beautiful, and he stared in the mirror for an hour that first night. He wasn’t even sure there were enough words to describe the colors he saw in his own face; peaches-and-cream complexion with a rosy blush, eyes that were a patchwork of jade and bronze, ash-brown hair with sun-lightened streaks, thin trails of royal blue veins just under the skin of his neck. (He didn’t know the names of all those colors at the time, but he stayed up late trying to learn them.)

As time went on, he was forced to admit that the colors that made up Michael were the most beautiful colors in the world. His skin was in constant flux, any of a thousand shades of pink and beige, and his eyes… oh, God, his eyes. His eyes were hazelnut but in the light they turned pure gold, like sunlight through a glass of whiskey. His hair was russet and copper and chocolate and beaten brass, all smudged together in curls that looked soft as an oil painting.

That’s how it started. It started with him admiring how beautifully Michael was put together, how vibrant he was, and then how broad his shoulders were, and then how nicely his back sloped into his ass…

That last part stuck with him a lot, he even vented about it to Dan, who wasn’t very happy that Gavin’s newest distraction was as good-looking as Michael was. But it was a distraction, because Gavin genuinely found Michael funny and yes, sometimes even charming, and he didn’t want to just start lusting after him because he’d already experienced what it’s like when a friends-with-benefits turns into more than that for one person and he didn’t want to experience it again. Besides, Michael was his soulmate; if there was one person in the world he didn’t want to ruin things with, it would be him.

So he made it a point to try and be friendlier with him. He asked him out for a drink and spent the whole night laughing. He acquiesced when Michael asked him to tone it down. He agreed to do a video with him. He basically made himself as likeable as possible and he was delighted when it started working. Even if he hadn’t fallen in love with his soulmate yet, he could at least be friends with him.

As he got friendlier with Michael, he gushed about it more to Dan, whose patience ran out fairly quickly. Eventually, and it wasn’t a complete surprise, Dan called it off. Gavin did what he always did during a fight with Dan and begged him not to leave, and when that didn’t work, he went somewhere where he could be alone and cried about it. Normally he got it out of his system quickly and then had a few days to work out how to win back Dan, but this time he hadn’t even finished the grieving process when Michael found him.

It was a tense moment. He was vulnerable and the angles of Michael’s face had softened with sympathy. When Michael sat beside him and they looked into each other’s eyes, he was sure they were about to kiss… but then Michael’s eyes widened and he blanched like he’d seen a ghost, and then he jumped up and wouldn’t even look at Gavin, would only speak to him in terse words, and Gavin thought that the only thing that could make someone react like that was the sudden discovery of a soulmate.

Sure, it was a little weird that it hadn’t happened right away, and he was a little upset that Michael seemed so much less in favor of things than he did. But still. They were soulmates with each other. He’d heard horror stories all his life, about people whose soulmates died and they went back to seeing black and white, or about people whose soulmates didn’t love them and married someone else, or about people whose soulmates were a different sexual orientation. (Hell, what if Michael was straight? That hadn’t even occurred to him before.)

And then things were okay for a little while until the second rooftop conversation. See, things would have been so easy if Gavin hadn’t already fallen in love. Sometime when he hadn’t been paying attention, he had fallen head-over-heels in love with Michael bloody Jones, and he didn’t even realize it until he heard Michael’s blurted “Gavin, I think you’re my soulmate.” He didn’t realize how happy it would make him, how relieved that he wouldn’t be one of those horror stories, how much he wanted Michael to confess his love…

And how much it would hurt when he said that he didn’t love Gavin, and how he implied that he might not ever love Gavin, and Gavin was stuck with the image of Michael ruffling up his hair and the softness of his name in Michael’s mouth and he wasn’t sure what to do with them. It was even harder when he got home that night and sat on his bed and found that he had too many memories to hold like pictures in his hands. The warmth of the first time Michael smiled at him. The hesitation when Michael called him “Gav”, like it was a name he had no right to. The way the taste of that first beer mingled with the taste of victory. The way the word yes tumbled out in a tangled mess the first time Michael asked him to work on a video with him. Smaller memories, too; Michael’s too-firm handshake, the lounging way he sat on the couch, always taking up too much space, the way his voice turns from loud and aggressive to polite when he has to talk on the phone.

That was something Gavin didn’t expect when he met Michael: that someone’s personality can be as multicolored and varied as their hair, and that good memories can hurt just as much as bad ones.

Ultimately, though, what he took away was this: being someone’s soulmate, in the end, doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.


	4. In Which Okay, Maybe This Could Work

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, folks, this will be the end. Hope you liked it! Please comment!

Working with Gavin wasn’t quite as easy afterwards as Michael might have hoped. He kinda figured, well, he’d already told Gavin that they were– how had Gavin put it?– cosmically meant to be; after something like that, things have to be easier, right? Getting all that weight off his chest?

Fucking wrong.

For some reason, Gavin became a lot more distant after that conversation. For the first few days it wasn’t a problem; nothing wrong with having a little space to think, and he appreciated that Gavin respected that, but after those few days were up, it started to get weird.

“He’ll get over it,” Ray said when Michael asked about it. “It’s kind of a shock, y’know?”

“I didn’t tell him I love him,” Michael scoffed, muting the TV and flipping through the channels.

Ray was quiet, and Michael heard the soft rustle of what was probably a Wendy’s bag. “Maybe that’s the problem,” he said through a mouth of fucking Junior Bacon Cheeseburger. Just for once could Ray not eat while Michael was on the phone with him? For God’s sake.

“Shut the hell up, Ray. He just got dumped, somehow I doubt the first thing on his mind is getting with me.”

“Maybe that’s why he got dumped. You know, because Dan knew that he’s in love with you.”

Michael sighed. “There’s no way that happens in real life. That’s just some stupid rom-com bullshit. No one who loves their boyfriend is like ‘I love you but... I know you love someone else, so I have to let you go’.”

“You don’t think people make sacrifices for love?”

What the hell was Ray’s obsession with love? “Sacrifices like going to see their parents for Christmas instead of yours, not dumping them.”

“Isn’t that what they say, though? If you love them, let them go, and if they come back they’re yours and if they don’t they never were?”

“Everything about that is fucking stupid. They might come back because they love your money or your dick. If they never come back that doesn’t mean they were never yours. If you date for five years and then they leave, did you never date at all? Like some fucked up chicken and the egg theory, or something.” The TV settled on a silent football game. Michael couldn’t focus on it long enough to even see which teams were playing. “And the whole thing relies on some idea of ‘destiny’. I don’t buy that shit.”

Ray made a sort of choking sound. Served him right. “You what? There are literally soulmates. You were literally predestined to meet Gavin and be his soulmate. How do you not buy that?”

Michael couldn’t quite put what he was feeling into words: that he was predestined to meet Gavin but not to love him, that being soulmates was a lot more complicated than that, that he wanted to make Gavin laugh and he wanted to punch him in the face and a little part of him just wanted to stare into those big green eyes but he wasn’t sure whether he could call that love or not. He settled on a clever retort (“shut up”) and begrudgingly thanked Ray for letting him rant before hanging up.

The next day was a Friday, so, remembering that it had worked for him, the first thing Michael did when he got to the office (late) was to see if Gavin wanted to grab some bevs after work. Yeah, he still thought the term “bev” was stupid, but he figured it would be better to talk to Gavin in his own made-up language. A little surprisingly, Gavin said yes, and it was actually fun, like the first time.

With every beer, Gavin perked up, like he was forgetting why he was so pissy over the last few days. Michael could actually, like, talk to him again. After he’d had a few himself, he decided to ask. “So Gav, you’re not mad at me, right?”

“Me? Nahhhh,” Gavin laughed, his voice more than a little slurred but bubbling with happiness. “Why’d y’ think that?”

“I dunno, I jus’… I dunno.” He finished his drink and stood up. “We should go, if I drink anymore I can’t drive home.”

Gavin followed him, somewhat staggeringly, out to Michael’s car, and climbed into the backseat. After a second’s hesitation, Michael climbed in next to him, and as soon as he’d closed the door, Gavin grinned wide and kissed him hard. He’d pictured his first kiss with his soulmate a thousand times, he figured, but he’d never imagined it like this: hot and messy and desperate, tasting of beer and metal (he’d realize later it was blood from where Gavin bit his lip).

There was some part of Michael that didn’t want to push this because he’d only just gotten friendly with Gavin again and Gavin had been dumped pretty recently, but who the fuck could give a shit about all that when Gavin’s hair was so soft and his eyes so big? Who the fuck could ever stop when every kiss, every touch, made the world spark into color like the fireworks Michael had never seen? Who the hell could resist tearing Gavin’s shirt off and running their hands over his chest while his skin blushed in a hundred shades of pink?

And that was to say nothing of how fucking good it felt to have a hot guy squirming and groaning under him, grinding back against him, breath hot against his neck and nails sharp on his shoulders. For the first time in years Michael thought he’d get laid in the back of a car, although it had seemed a lot roomier back when he was a teenager, and it was hot and it was good and it was…

Over. Michael was nuzzling Gavin’s neck and Gavin was whispering nonsense until it wasn’t nonsense anymore, it was a soft murmured “I love you”, and Michael reeled back like he’d been shoved. All of a sudden it wasn’t two drunken idiots getting it on, it was Michael taking advantage of Gavin’s love, and he would have none of it. Apologizing under his breath, he put his own shirt back on, zipped his jeans, and got into the driver’s seat, leaving Gavin to sort himself out in the back.

He was too tired and tipsy to drive to Geoff’s, so he just took Gavin back to his place, dragging him in and dropping him on his own bed. Gavin fell asleep pretty immediately, and Michael made sure he was on his side in case he threw up before crashing on the couch.

He woke up with less of a headache than he was expecting. He showered, just put on a robe and pair of boxers that were in the laundry hamper (what the fuck did he care?), and started making coffee. Long after the black coffee and three Advil had started their work, Gavin crawled out of bed, looking a mess with fucked-up hair, bleary eyes, and his shirt on backwards.

When he saw Michael, he jumped half a mile in their air and mumbled some stupid-ass British swear under his breath. “Hey Gav,” Michael said, not taking his eyes off the rerun of Always Sunny in Philadelphia he’d turned on.

“You’re not hungover,” Gavin said, sounding almost accusatory, like the shittiest Inquisition in history.

“A little. I wasn’t as drunk as you were.”

Michael could hear the squeak of his foot moving back and forth on the floor. “You remember everything, don’t you?” There was a kind of resigned sadness to his voice.

“Yeah.”

“Do you… regret it?”

“I regret not saying it back.”

The squeaking stopped abruptly, and Michael finally looked over at Gavin, if only to smile at the pure shock on his face. “Yeah?” Gavin said finally, voice high and trying and failing so hard to  
sound casual, laughably so.

“Yeah.” Michael turned back to Always Sunny. If Gavin wanted some long beautiful speech about how much he meant to Michael, and how much he loved him, he’d found the wrong soulmate, but somehow he knew, if Gavin felt about him the way he did about Gavin, that perfectly imperfect would be good enough.


End file.
